


When at first I learned to speak, I used all my words to fight

by Kacka



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 01:39:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13893522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: After spending six years shouting into the void of a radio with no one on the other end, it's daunting to tell Bellamy how she feels to his face. It's a big deal. Though maybe not as big a deal as Clarke is making of it.





	When at first I learned to speak, I used all my words to fight

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @royalblakes on tumblr as part of the Bellarke Secret Valentines event.
> 
> Up on ao3 a little later than planned because time is something I don't have enough of these days

They get together quietly.

For one thing, there’s not a lot of time for fanfare. Survival was a full-time job back when Clarke and Madi had the place to themselves. No matter how often they’d wished for another set of hands, another adult around to help with heavy lifting or divvy up responsibilities too dangerous for an unsupervised twelve-year-old to handle alone, having the seven from the ring back on the ground means they need five times as many resources as they did before. And that’s without the Eligius settlement to contend with.

Clarke wouldn’t admit it, but she has a lot of hopes riding on digging up the bunker. Hopes that the mounting tensions with Eligius over resources and green land won’t come to a war, or if it does, that she and her eight will not stand against them alone. Hopes that they were able to get their underground farm up and running, and that might ease some of the strain.

Suffice it to say they’re a little too busy, too distracted, for Clarke and Bellamy’s relationship status to be anyone’s focus for long.

More than that, though, is how her friends-- and even Madi, who had never met Bellamy-- don’t seem to find their tentative togetherness a novelty.

“It would be nice if they _acted_ surprised,” Clarke grumbles one night. Bellamy laughs and hooks his arm around her waist, drags her closer. In spite of her petulance, she lets herself sink into his warmth. His fingertips drag up and down the bare skin of her back, tracing every ridge and valley in her spine.

“You just don’t like it when other people know something you don’t.”

“I knew,” she objects. “I knew how I felt and I even knew how you felt. Or I was pretty sure. We just had-- timing issues.”

“Sorry I have such an obvious thing for you,” he teases. “I’ll try to pretend I don’t like you more when we’re in public. Keep the mystery alive.”

“I’m obvious too. I never told Madi what you meant to me, but the radio thing--”

“Doing anything every day without fail takes commitment.” He kisses her hair. “Plus kids think everything is romantic at that age. When I was twelve I was convinced that a girl in my class offering to share her book when I forgot mine meant she liked me.”

“She probably did.” Clarke smiles, turning her face so that her cheek is pressed more fully to his chest. “I’m sure you were a little heartbreaker back in the day.”

He laughs again, the best sound she’s ever heard. “You jealous?”

“So jealous.”

“You don’t need to be.” His hand rises insistently to thread his fingers through her hair, tilting her face up toward his in the process. “You get me for keeps.”

“For keeps, huh?” Clarke kisses him, lets him make it deep and searching even as anxiety curls beneath her ribs, spooling in that familiar place in her gut she reserves for very specific kinds of worry.

But she doesn’t want to think about that now. Not with Bellamy soft and warm and happy in her bed. So she twines her legs with his and lets her hands and mind wander, immersing herself so fully in him that there isn’t room for anything else.

Once he’s drifted off, however, Clarke can’t keep the fear at bay anymore. She studies his face, memorizing and mapping his features by sight the way he had done with touch earlier.

The words are just within reach, but they stick in her throat until she can’t breathe, can’t speak. So she nuzzles into his side and feels his heart beating under her palm and pretends it doesn’t feel like the ticking of a clock counting down the seconds until she loses him.

* * *

She hangs back from the scavenging party the next morning, claiming she needs to take inventory (which technically wouldn’t hurt) but really needing some time to think. After so many years alone, she hadn’t thought she’d want to be alone with her thoughts once she had other alternatives, but having people around has proven to be overwhelming, to say the least. She’d even go so far as aggravating.

It’s not like Monty’s organizational system for their supplies is _wrong_ , and it’s not like she’s not _grateful_ to have Murphy’s cooking over her own, and it’s not like she’d prefer it if Raven didn’t have quite so _many_ tools… but she’s been used to having control over these things, as little and inconsequential as they are. It’s taking some getting used to.

Mostly, though, she doesn’t need the time apart for her sanity so much as she needs distance from them all so she can think clearly. She doesn’t know when she started relying on her heart more than her head (though probably sometime around the death wave), but it’s not doing her any favors when it gives her all these irrational mental blocks.

Luckily, Raven stays behind most days too, and she’s always been willing to give it to Clarke straight.

Case in point, when Clarke brings her lunch to butter her up, she snaps, “I know you’re, like, supermom now, but I’m not twelve. I can fend for myself."

Clarke’s eyebrows float upward. “Yeah, I hate people doing nice stuff for me too,” she says mildly, coming over to see what Raven is working on.

The unearthing of the bunker is going slower than they’d all like, and she’s been drawing up schematics to convert the Rover into something that do the job more efficiently. Unfortunately, they don’t have much in the way of building materials, so Raven hasn’t been able to make much headway on it.

“Sorry.” Raven scowls at the page, tilts her head side to side until her neck cracks. “I don’t like problems I can’t solve. It makes me crabby.”

“I have a problem you can solve for me if you want something else to think about while you eat,” Clarke offers, nudging the bowl toward her. Raven looks up in interest now.

“I can only build so many things at once, you know.”

“This isn’t that kind of problem.”

“Oh.” She swipes the bowl and leans back in her chair, a smirk making its way onto her face. “This is about Bellamy.”

“Maybe.”

Raven hums, eyeing her with new interest. “I’m not really sure what I have to offer for this conversation. Girl talk? Not my favorite. I’m not great with emotions. I’d replace you all with robots if I could.”

“Emotions I’ve got in spades. What I need is logic.”

“You?”

Clarke snorts. “I know. I’m kind of freaking out about the whole--” She nearly chokes on the words but forces them out where they wouldn’t come in the early hours of the morning. “--’I love you’ thing.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Raven scoffs. “He definitely loves you. I’m impressed he’s shown this much restraint but if he hasn’t said it yet, it’s only because he’s trying to make himself be mature and shit, which-- I give him like a week before he cracks.”

Clarke’s heart lurches. “I’m not feeling… insecure. I know he-- how he feels about me. I’m worried I won’t be able to say it back.”

Raven’s good humor fades into something wary. “You don’t love him anymore?”

“I--” She pauses. Swallows. “I just-- It’s so stupid. But I feel like I have the kiss of death, you know?” Raven’s face softens and Clarke bristles against it. “I can’t lose someone else I-- feel that way about. I can’t lose _Bellamy_.”

“I get it.” Raven bites her lip. “I spent a lot of time in space thinking about last words. Things I wished I’d said to Finn, or to Jasper or to you.”

“Me?” Clarke asks, momentarily distracted.

“Yeah.” She shrugs one shoulder. “My last words to you were your death warrant. Or so we thought. It doesn’t matter now, but-- the point is, I spent a lot of time regretting things I didn’t say. Not telling him how you feel won’t save his life. And it won’t make you stop feeling it. It’ll just make the life you guys have now a little shittier.”

Clarke’s laugh comes out guttural, even a little watery.

“Even just thinking the words makes me feel like I’m saying goodbye.”

“Annnd we’ve crossed firmly into emotional territory.” Raven leans forward and claps her on the shoulder. “You’ve got a mental block. That’s not a rational thing, so I’m tapping out. But you know who would be really good to talk to about this?”

“Monty?”

“Bellamy. He’s all about feelings. Yours, specifically. And you’re together, right? You guys are supposed to have these mushy conversations.”

“I’m afraid that if I bring it up he’s going to say it.”

Raven snorts and turns back to her schematics. “That’s a risk you’re just going to have to take. Hand me that wrench?”

Clarke sits with her a while longer in companionable silence, wondering if she can work up the nerve to say those three words before she comes face-to-face with Bellamy again.

“I’m heading back to the house,” she sighs, when her efforts prove fruitless. Raven hums noncommittally and Clarke pauses in the doorway. “You sure that’s all you want to say? I could trip and die on the way back to the house and the last thing you will have ever said to me will--”

“Get out, you asshole.” Raven laughs, tossing a crumpled wad of paper in her general direction. Clarke is grinning as she dodges it, blowing her friend a kiss.

“Love you too.”

As she goes, she can hear Raven grumbling under her breath “-- _terrible_ sense of humor… _made_ for each other--” and it makes her smile the whole way back.

* * *

Madi finds her first when they all return, delivering a bundle of roots and sprigs that Eligius hasn’t figured out to start collecting yet. Some of them can be planted and harvested in a few months’ time, but most of them have medicinal or nutritious properties of their own, so Clarke has been stockpiling as much as she can before the mining colony catches on.

Bellamy squeezes her shoulder as he passes, too deep in conversation with Harper and Murphy to interrupt her time with the kid. Relief washes over Clarke, immediately followed by guilt. She _wants_ to spend time with Bellamy. She doesn’t want to avoid him just because she’s trying to avoid a conversation.

Still, she takes her time cleaning up after dinner, dawdling with every little chore that she can come up with. By the time she crawls into bed, wrapping herself around Bellamy’s curled-up body, he’s almost asleep.

“Hey,” he mumbles, slurring through his drowsiness. Clarke strokes her thumb across his abdomen.

“Go back to sleep.”

“Wasn’t asleep,” he protests, contrary to the last. “Was waiting for you.”

Guilt twists at her insides again. She rests her forehead against his back and breathes him in, soothing her frayed nerves.

“I’m here now. So go to sleep.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” he grumbles, but it isn’t long after that the sound of his breathing evens out, light snores vibrating through his chest.

I’m going to tell you soon, she thinks, fondness welling within her as she lets herself drift off after him.

* * *

By the time morning rolls around, she’s even more exhausted than she had been the night before. She’d been so on edge all day that every little noise during the night woke her up, every minute movement Bellamy made jolting her from the shallow pool of sleep she’d been wading in and out of all night.

She feels it when Bellamy wakes. His breath stutters and quiets, and after a few moments he goes to move out from under her arm, turning over to face her instead.

He freezes when his eyes meet hers, and then he slumps into his pillow, grinning sheepishly.

“I was trying not to wake you,” he says, voice even lower and raspier in the morning. Clarke smiles back, weary.

“You didn’t. I’ve been tossing and turning all night.”

“Really?” He frowns, brushing hair out of her eyes. “I didn’t feel anything.”

“Metaphorically,” she amends, leaning into his touch.

“What’s going on in there?” He teases, tapping a finger against her temple.

Clarke’s smile turns wry. “It’s stupid.”

“Gold, I always like a laugh first thing in the morning.”

She kicks at him under the covers but he hooks his foot around hers, tugs her closer. Clarke lets him pull her in, tucking her head under his chin and nestling into his warmth. Bellamy plays with the ends of her hair and waits her out. He’s always known what she needs, and suddenly Clarke can’t keep it in anymore.

“I love you,” she mumbles, her words muffled against his sleep shirt.

“I love you too,” he says, so light she’s almost mad how easy it is for him. He gives a couple of gentle tugs on her hair. “Seriously, Clarke. You okay?”

Clarke tips her head back to scowl at him. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to do this first thing in the morning after a sleepless night. She isn’t in the best of moods.

“Do you know how hard it is for me to say that?” She demands, the bite in her words taking him by surprise. “It’s _terrifying_. It kept me up _all night_.”

Bellamy’s face is understanding but not pitying. His thumb slips under the hem of her shirt, stroking at the skin of her hip.

“I’m not going anywhere, Clarke.”

“You don’t know that,” she croaks, inexplicably and embarrassingly emotional all of a sudden.

“I’m too stubborn to die,” he jokes gently. “And anyway, I’ve become a lot more cautious in my old age.”

“You’re twenty-nine.”

“I have six grey hairs. _Six_.”

“This isn’t funny,” she says, but she’s fighting a smile. “I’m being serious here.”

“You? Serious? Doesn’t compute,” he teases, the flex of his arm bringing her even closer. “I wouldn’t have minded if you needed to wait to say it. Or if I said it first and you didn’t say it back.”

“I minded.” She bites her lip. “It’s so-- Not saying it doesn’t make it not true. It wouldn’t have made losing you any easier.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s going to suck in eighty years when you go peacefully in your sleep. I’m hoping we time it just right so we go together.”

Clarke huffs, something inside of her loosening as he so casually mentions their future together. She wants it so badly she can taste it, bittersweet on her tongue.

“If that’s how we go, I think I’m looking forward to it.”

Bellamy’s hand drifts higher absently, like he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it. Clarke definitely notices, if the goosebumps slowly spreading across her skin are any indication.

“I’m sorry it’s been worrying you. I wish there was something I could say to make it stop.”

“I feel a little better already,” she admits. “I said it, you said it, and the sky didn’t fall.”

“The world didn’t end.” He grins. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

“Well now you’ve gone and jinxed us.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, if the world ends today, it’ll be my fault.”

“As long as you accept responsibility.”

For a moment all she can hear is wind blowing through the chimes hanging in her window, leaves rustling on the trees outside.

“You should try to get a little bit of sleep before we leave,” he says at last. “I’m kind of worried you’re going to drive into a ditch or something if we don’t.”

Clarke hums, her eyes heavy when she lets them close. “We’re supposed to get going soon.”

“We can wait to head out until after lunch.” He kisses her hair. “I can go let them know.”

“No,” she says, tightening her hold on him when he tries to get up. “Stay here.”

“So demanding,” he grumbles, but she can hear the smile in his voice. “I guess they’ll either wait or go on without us.”

“They’ll figure it out,” Clarke agrees.

For a moment there’s nothing but the heavy drag of his hand on her arm lulling her to sleep. Before unconsciousness can claim her, she says, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I love you.”

Bellamy squeezes his hand on her side. “Yeah, I love you too. Get some sleep, Clarke.”

And at last, feeling safe and content and warm in his arms, she does.


End file.
